CVR Community

Permanent URI for this community

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11990/1
This Center for Victim Research Community serves as a one-stop resource for victim service providers and researchers to connect and share knowledge to increase (1) access to victim research and data and (2) the utility of research and data collection to crime victim services nationwide. This CVR Community contains open access and public domain research-based resources about victims of crime. This community is continually updated. Contact librarian@victimresearch.org to submit a resource.

Browse

Browsing CVR Community by Subject "#MeToo"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Believe #metoo: Sexual Violence and Interpersonal Disclosure Experiences Among Women Attending a Sexual Assault Service in Australia: A Mixed-methods Study
    (BMJ Open, 2019) Rees, Susan; Simpson, Lisa; McCormack, Clare; Moussa, Batool; Amanatidis, Sue
    Objectives Sexual abuse is a strong predictor of future psychiatric problems. A more nuanced qualitative understanding of mental health outcomes, in the context of interpersonal responses from family members towards survivors after sexual abuse, may help to better inform prevention and interventions. Design A mixed-methods approach included a qualitative timeline method to map and identify contextual factors and mediating emotional responses associated with mental disorder following sexual abuse…Results The MINI prevalence of current post-traumatic stress disorder was 96.6% (n=28) and of major depressive disorder was 82.8% (n=24). More than half (53%) reported suicidal ideation at some time in their lives. Women exposed to childhood sexual abuse reported being ignored, not believed, or threatened with retribution on disclosing the abuse to others, usually adult family members, at or close to the time of the violation(s). Participants described experiences of self-blame, betrayal, and psychosocial vulnerability as being the responses that connected negative disclosure experiences with mental disorder. Participant accounts suggest that these reactions created the foundations for both immediate and long-term adverse psychological outcomes. Conclusion A more in-depth understanding of the type and emotional impact of negative responses to disclosure by parents and other family members, and the barriers to adequate support, validation and trust, may inform strategies to avert much of the longer-term emotional difficulties and risks that survivors encounter following childhood abuse experiences. These issues should receive closer attention in research, policy, and practice. (Author Abstract)
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Discounting Women: Doubting Domestic Violence Survivors' Credibility and Dismissing Their Experiences
    (University of Pennsylvania, 2019) Epstein, Deborah; Goodman, Lisa
    In recent months, we’ve seen an unprecedented wave of testimonials about the serious harms women all too frequently endure. The #MeToo moment, the #WhyIStayed campaign, and the Larry Nassar sentencing hearings have raised public awareness not only about workplace harassment, domestic violence, and sexual abuse, but also about how routinely women survivors face a Gaslight-style gauntlet of doubt, disbelief, and outright dismissal of their stories. This pattern is particularly disturbing in the justice system, where women face a legal twilight zone: laws meant to protect them and deter further abuse often fail to achieve their purpose, because women telling stories of abuse by their male partners are simply not believed. To fully grasp the nature of this new moment in gendered power relations—and to cement the significant gains won by these public campaigns—we need to take a full, considered look at when, how, and why the justice system and other key social institutions discount women’s credibility. We use the lens of intimate partner violence to examine the ways in which women’s credibility is discounted in a range of legal and social service system settings. First, judges and others improperly discount as implausible women’s stories of abuse, based on a failure to understand both the symptoms arising from neurological and psychological trauma, and the practical constraints on survivors’ lives. Second, gatekeepers unjustly discount women’s personal trustworthiness, based on both inaccurate interpretations of survivors’ courtroom demeanor and negative cultural stereotypes about women and their motivations for seeking assistance. Moreover, even when a woman manages to overcome all the initial modes of institutional skepticism that minimize her account of abuse, she often finds that the systems designed to furnish her with help and protection dismiss the importance of her experiences. Instead, all too often, the arbiters of justice and social welfare adopt and enforce legal and social policies and practices with little regard for how they perpetuate patterns of abuse. Two distinct harms arise from this pervasive pattern of credibility discounting and experiential dismissal. First, the discrediting of survivors constitutes its own psychic injury—an institutional betrayal that echoes the psychological abuse women suffer at the hands of individual perpetrators. Second, the pronounced, nearly instinctive penchant for devaluing women’s testimony is so deeply embedded within survivors’ experience that it becomes a potent, independent obstacle to their efforts to obtain safety and justice. (Author Text)
All resources in this community are in the public domain or have been designated as open access (free of licensing restrictions) by the copyright owner. Many of the items included in this collection were not produced by the Center for Victim Research. If you are the copyright owner for an item that has been erroneously included in this collection, please notify us.